em,
there are a score who have continued their victims, until ruin, and
a premature death, closed their career. How much safer, how much
easier and pleasanter, how much more promising and hopeful, to
commence life with good habits well established, with high
principles, sound maxims, enlightened rules of conduct, deeply fixed
in the soul. This is a plain, pleasant, prosperous path--readily
found, and easily followed. In no other can you secure true
enjoyment.

"We cannot live too slowly to be good
And happy, nor too much by line and square.
But youth is burning to forestall its nature,
And will not wait for time to ferry it
Over the stream; but flings itself into
The flood and perishes. *******
The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat
Oneself. **************"

There is nothing more essential to the young than to accustom
themselves to mature reflection, and practical observation, in
regard to the duties of life, and the sources of human enjoyment.
This is a task, however, which but few of the youthful are inclined
to undertake. The most of them are averse to giving up their
thoughts to sober meditation on the consequences which accrue from
different courses of conduct, or to practical observation on the
lessons taught by the experience of others. The Present!--the
Present!--its amusements, its gayeties, its fashions, absorbs nearly
all their thoughts. They have little relish to look towards the
future, except to anticipate the continuance of the novelty and
joyousness of the spring-time of life. The poet utters a most
salutary admonition in his beautiful lines:

"The beam of the morning, the bud of the Spring,
The promise of beauty and brightness may bring;
But clouds gather darkness, and touched by the frost,
The pride of the plant, and the morning are lost.
Thus the bright and the beautiful ever decay--
Life's morn and life's flowers, oh, they quick pass away!"

I would not cast one unnecessary shadow on the pathway of the young;
but they should be often reminded, that the season of youth, with
its romance and light-heartedness, soon, too soon, departs! Spring,
with its budding beauties, and fragrant blossoms, does not continue
all the year. It is speedily followed by the fervid summer, the
mature and sober autumn, and the dreary snows of winter. In order to
have thriving and promising fields in summer, rich and abundant
harvests in aut